I am a HRBP supporting a 4000 employee, w/roughly 400 in Development & SQA SW Development shop.

We are part of a much larger parent company with decentralized HR and very little shared best practices from OpCo to OpCo.

Historically, our HR function has not been the most progressive and the workforce planning "exercises" have solely occurred between the business and finance. I am looking to bring additional HR rigor to the table for the first time by partnering w/our Technical Recruiter and wondering if anyone can shared general ideas, tools, e-tools (workforce planning websites) and/or something as simple as an excel template.

If anyone has something they’d be willing to share, please feel free to post your comments or email me directly

I have a question for anyone who has recruited for, or supported a Java SW dev shop over the last 3 years...

Pearson VUE has historically NOT hired entry-level/Associate Java Developers but has begun to do so over the last 2 years. We have done this primarily through an internship/feeder program but I am concerned in doing so, we've offered wages lower than market and may run into retention/competitive pay issues as those developers grow into mid-level roles.

Basically, I'd like to offer our next group of developers more completive wages than the initial two as supported by our internal MRP data, but am concerned about equity issues with the last 2 classes of Java developers and the precedence their initial offers may have set.

I am leaning towards offering higher salaries than in the past, but not as high-as I'd like to based on the market data in lieu of our current internal equity. The higher offer amounts for our 2012-2013 developers would result in those employees being 4-6% above last year’s students.

Please feel free to respond direcltly @ matt.plitzkow@Pearson.com or via the forum. Feel free to share data from other regions as I have a geogrpahic differentail tool I can use to make the salaries roughly equivalent...